Newsletter

November 23rd, 2008

Preparing for citizenship in the Obama Nation

Obama will be our next president. This is exciting news in many ways, but I think that we also need to acknowledge that all of our lives will be a little harder now that he is running the show. Over the course of his campaign we all got quite familiar with his commitment to change. It’s time for change, he said, and clearly we agreed. Let me remind you, however, of the path he sees toward that change. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he said sometime in the primary race. Did you get that “we”? This man is not promising to go to Washington and fix our problems, he expects us to participate.

The problem is that we Americans have grown used to being told that we’re fine the way we are. We’ve been coddled with the idea that there are always others behaving worse than we are, and that if they don’t have to change, we shouldn’t have to either. We will not be indulged like this under Obama. We’re going to have to alter our individual lives, I’m afraid.

Well, it’s what we said we wanted, America as a group. Here’s a nice easy first step toward taking on the responsibility we elected Obama to give to us: take the train to San Francisco. A lot of you all come here for work and then rent cars to drive to SF on your days, and even just nights, off. Take CalTrain instead. You can catch it right near this hotel, it’ll cost less than you’d pay for two gallons of gas, never mind the money saved by not renting a car at all. Plus I think I’ll toss the word traffic in here without even feeling like I need to attach it to a proper sentence. It leaves every hour, it’ll take you right to the heart of the city and it’ll decrease the size of your carbon footprint. You will be a better citizen of this new era even before Inauguration Day.